Indeed, there may be no such thing as proper English, but that doesn't mean all shifts or variations are equal; increased ambiguity can be a practical problem.

Addendum: I tried to post this comment, but Slashdot mobile appeared to eat it. So I forced the classic site with a "request desktop" switch up, logged back in, found the comment I meant to reply to, and tried reposting. Now it's saying that my exact comment has already been posted, but I don't see it, so one way or another Slashdot is screwing up. Hey /., F U.

Indeed, there may be no such thing as proper English, but that doesn't mean all shifts or variations are equal; increased ambiguity can be a practical problem.

It's for the sake of niceness (well, security and consistency) with locking/unlocking a session. KDE can be run just fine without systemd, just regresses slightly (to how it has acted in all times previously) without systemd.

Frankly, that's the completely sensible way to act towards systemd, and I would be baffled why GNOME didn't follow a similar path if I didn't know that the GNOME and systemd camps are both heavily connected due to Red Hat (the same folks have long talked about the concept of "GnomeOS", and Poettering has called the kernel a mere "implementation detail"; KDE doesn't have the same ties, and has over time gotten less wedded to specific underlying structures and stacks at the same time that GNOME and GTK has gotten moreso).

Personally, I find systemd just a little too complicated, and have run into at least one showstopping issue that, while not a bug in systemd itself, wouldn't really have happened without the level of interlocking complexity that systemd inserts. Distro-creators love it, and it honestly does work well on things like mobile devices (hello there, SailfishOS!) because it makes easier the process of setting up a specific system to be used widely in that exact configuration. But I'm quite apprehensive of how it will interact with more chaotic systems, like normal Linux desktops and servers where many different pieces of hardware and software are installed and all affecting and interacting with systemd. I've installed Debian Jessie on my Raspberry Pi 2 for the sake of toying around with it so I get some experience with it (and immediately ran into the aforementioned issue and created a bug report for it).

No, that's just the motto of all programmers.

Ack, hit the keyboard and accidentally moderated you troll. Weirdly fitting to make such a mistake in relation to Suicide Linux.

Hi, welcome to /.! You must be new around here . . . ;)

As a mashup of We Can Remember It For You Wholesale and Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, it was admittedly somewhat different in tone than Dick's works but still paid attention to his ideas and created an interesting, thoughfully constructed world to explore them through. And on the typical shoestring Canadian budget, to boot (and with an amazing theme, but that's another story). I think you're right that Big Ideas science fiction tends to flail and fail when squished onto the "big" screen, but TV is where you have enough room to breathe that these ideas can actually be explored.

Hey, at this rate, a post-capitalist, post-currency society is the only chance of Nokia making communicators for folks again anyways.

Honestly, though, if anything Nolan's general failing has been in the emotional department, he's actually pretty good with grand, sweeping ideas. And anything to do with the Foundation series is going to work best as something along the lines of an HBO series, certainly at least in terms of budget and length (and we-don't-need-no-stinking-ratings). So although it certainly could go really badly, I think there's a chance that a Foundation series could work out.

This is a "yes, but..." kind of situation. Yes, the point is to keep up with your friends (and to pay for this by interjecting ads inbetween), but the problem is once you cross a certain threshold, trying to read a strictly chronological timeline on your screen can become quite impractical. To make matters worse, people who use Facebook can have dramatically different levels of output; while some folks will only ever post text or a picture when it's truly important and/or generally interesting, others post everything that occurs to them from memes to cute things their boyfriends said. To make matters even worse than that, the people reading these posts may vary wildly in what things shared by their ostensible friends they actually care about.

So in practice, especially as/if folks' online output grows in volume, to keep up with your friends may (and for most people definitely does) require something more than the pure firehose of the chronological stream. At least, that's definitely the perspective Facebook is coming from here, and what AI can definitely help them with, because if there's anything more annoying than being overwhelmed by useless information, it's being denied the useful information, so a bad choice in what not to display to someone can leave the user quite upset with the 'dumb computer'. In a sense, the AI has to have learned enough to never make sure a mistake before it can truly prune down and tune the information presented to the user, and so investing in such AI research is a rather prudent move on Facebook's part.

In many respects, Twitter has succeeded because it's artificially limited in the size of the data packets you can throw out into everyone's timelines; additional data is offloaded to links. Facebook wants to be more multifaceted in the types and scopes of the data over its network, with the desire of being the underlying network for all communication, so they're (quite reasonably) very focused on how to intelligently predict and pick what to present to people.

Once violence is initiated, the original victim has the legal right (in all civilized countries) to defend oneself by stopping the threat violence. That always requires an escalation.

How does that always require an escalation? A person can threaten you with a knife while you're out around the BBQ and you can run inside and lock them out of the house, for example.

So there's some "current" that's "flowing" then? What's that current comprised of, and why is it behaving that way, just sticking to these diodes and such and not just flowing off onto the tablet or whatever? [ENTER QUANTUM MECHANICS, STAGE LEFT]

It's easy to get the two confused, they're like Bruce Wayne and Batman, you never see both of them in the same room.

The usual defence seems to mostly be pointing towards historical data and towards the relatively well-understood nature of atmospheric CO2. Also, the vested interests in quickly burning through fossil fuels (way better returns for the next quarter than any sort of long-term investment in renewable technologies) makes me skeptical of the motives underlying the so-called skeptics.

Honestly, though, do we really think spewing tons of extraneous particles into the air is going to be a good thing? The Earth is a complex, chaotic system, we're not likely to stabilize it or make it more hospitable through these emissions. If throwing all that CO2 into the air ends up being better for the world and/or humanity it'd be like winning the lottery while being struck by lightning on your birthday.

Don't worry, I'm sure he has pet evidence to stare at and play with instead so he never has to look over at countervailing evidence like yours.